Religious Pilgrimages and Fetishes

This weekend’s features travel destinations highlighted New York Times this weekend are Nicaragua and Venezuela. I'd say it's an illuminating insight into the minds of the paper's staff, but it isn't.

Home Truths of the Radical. If You Happen to Live In a Barn.

Too much (and too many subjects) is never enough says lefty, regardless of how little he understands. Although I don’t expect to hear a question worthy of a teachable moment from this guy. Ever.

Like the rest of his scattershot, he’s repeating the “rich getting richer/poor getting poorer” meme about anything and everything which is based on a simple mathematical analysis which, in order to be “socially just” in the manner he hopes where any economic stratum are not year-on-year made richer at the same rate as anyone making less than them, would require that all taxation “progressively” creep up forever, and starting at the top. The top 20% (who pay 90% of all taxes in the US by the way) would eventually end up at a 99% tax rate. Thereafter every group of people who are slowly inflating their way to greater numerical wealth will join them at 99% because they then become the new source of funds for the project of involuntary wealth redistribution. Share the goods, Comrade!, because someday there won’t be any left for anyone!

By isolating what they call “middle-class” (I suppose they mean middle income if you can forgive them their fetish for class warfare,) in a fashion that the percentage of the poor is growing in relation to them. The only way this is possible is to isolate it in just that way, and assume that one doesn’t count people who are no longer middle income by virtue of RISING income, and rising right into the upper income brackets so thoroughly detested by those living in the bowels of envy-burg.

What makes all this so funny is that having lived behind the Iron Curtain before the fall of Communism, I can actually “get the joke” in a way that sincere (and often sincerely crazy) advocates of radical leftism are unable to.

Sobeit. If 6 decades of social and economic failure under Communism isn’t proof enough for someone, what is? I’m reminded of the BBC again which is permitted to function in its’ own intellectual vacuum in a similar way.

On the Womens’ Hour programme (as if the other 23 hours of Radio 4’s day weren’t pandering as equally and thoroughly to the ever fretful and angrily determined pious pilgrims of the Left©®™) – the subject of the Ipswich streetwalker murders was discussed. A group of panelists drilled a Police detective about matters of law beyond his control, and entirely made up of stock opinion points first heard two decades ago.

First up was media people complaining about the releasing by Police of photographs of the victims as they would with any other sort of victim. This is hilarious considering that the media itself is demanding the photos.
That bit of flashback not being enough (as if a Police detective could change that), there was a resuscitation of the consciously uneven demand that soliciting a prostitute should be illegal and have steep punishments (as it does in the US,) but that prostitution itself is legal for the seller in the transaction. Again, like much of the left’s social oeuvre, our panel couldn’t tell the difference between a crack-whore and a cash-whore.

Nonetheless, outliers of the left trying to please other outliers of the left bring out just how little they are willing to reason clearly in the interest of the accuracy of their claims. Lin fact here you can finds a handy little map of progressive obsessiveness at its’ very best. The relative distance between interest in Iraq and Democracy is quite telling.

Let ‘em have at it, I say.

It's the one who counts the vote that counts.

Don’t mention Europe’s other nation of sick pervy troops, please

According to the BBC, the Germans are scoring with skulls - sorry that’s “winning hearts and minds” in a way that is never reserved for anyone else such as the evil Yanqui.

Don’t be surprised

Chief blackmailer of the trade union racket finds “scandalous” that someone successful would move out of France for tax reasons. In the imperialistic mind of Le Monde Al-Jazeera sur Seine, that make Hallyday a fiscal “exile”.

Ironically, tearing apart anyone successful out of simple envy has always been observed to characterize social behavior in villages on the third world, but lately to be found true of western leftists intent on fostering the "solidarity" that comes with widespread economic collapse.

You’re banished from the island, Johnny!

Never Satisfied

“Bush in retreat, but the war rages on!”

Isn’t that what they wanted? What will lefty “need” next?

By "thumbs down" she means "put them to death"

Le Monde Al-Jazeera shreiks "Le Pen's new style well accepted by the French". As if the old style wasn't. The French preSS continues to conveniently forget that the Front National was the number two French political party in the presidential election of 2002, finishing ahead of the beloved Socialists.

Nobody Does it Better

Postings like these are why Fausta is the ant’s pants. She notes too that there we can look forward to a political lightweight convention coming up shortly, complete with funny hats. Ségolène Royal will be visiting the US and will likely have a photo-op with Barack Obama, another potential national political figure whom leftists will vote in over the mere symbolism of their appearance.

Improbably, they will think to themselves that this makes one less prejudicial.

Silly humanoids. How very amusing of them.

Paging Gwynyth Paltrow...

Are public slaughters out of place? Hell, no! Turkey fits right in to the EU if Turks are willing to debase themselves!:

A group of workers at Turkish Airlines were so happy to be rid of the last of a batch of troublesome planes that they sacrificed a camel at Istanbul airport. The national flag-carrier admitted on Wednesday that the staff had slaughtered the dromedary and that chief of the sacrifice-organizing group had been suspended pending an investigation.

The incident drew worldwide attention after Turkish newspapers carried pictures of the festooned camel before sacrifices and then the beast chopped up into meat chunks.

Top-selling daily Hurriyet reported that 700 kilos of camel meat were distributed among the airline workers.

Indeed no comment has yet to be heard from PETA or the celebrity idiots whoe try to ride their coat-tails.

Not a Peep From the Self-appointed “Revolutionary Humanists”

French military adventures are for adventurers, but if there is even the smallest unintended consequence takes place in Iraq, they’re all over it.



If the purple-helmeted gladiators or anyone else that the left idolizes get found out, they get a raft of excuses, if it’s even covered at all. How can L’Humanité Pravda not say anything after they’ve dispensed all their rage at Oncle Sam?

Two ethnic Tutsi women -- identified as "Witness Three" and "Witness Two" for security reasons and speaking from a hidden area at the commission -- said they had been raped by French troops after fleeing machete-wielding Hutu militia gangs.
"The French used to come to our refugee tents and take girls including myself to give us beer and cigarettes," said Witness Three. "When we became drunk, they would forcefully start to have sexual intercourse with us, many French soldiers at the same time, one after the other.

- link is thanks to reader Poppy Tesh

The Potential Price of Having “Solidarity” with People Who Want to Kill You

The Spanish Police could have saved the announcement for January11th. It would make no difference to this huge mob of potential victims of terror.

The Spanish daily El País has reported that a group of Islamic radicals with ties to Al Qaeda issued a call in May for liberating Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's other enclave in northern Morocco, from Spanish "occupation" through terrorist attacks.

El País said that intelligence officials considered the possibility of attack in the enclaves to be among the most serious threats to Spain from Islamic terrorism since the Madrid train bombings.

The investigation into the group arrested Tuesday began in March 2005. Spanish officials said the group had ties to Britain and Morocco.

Two of the men arrested Tuesday are brothers of a former Spanish detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Hamed Abderrahaman Ahmed, freed by the Spanish Supreme Court after the United States handed him over to Spanish authorities in 2004, Interior Ministry officials said.

All the silly protest antics in the world would not stop someone like either of Hamed Abderrahaman Ahmed’s brothers from harming the Spaniards al Qaeda stared down with little more than a glance. These are the very people protestors worldwide admire for throwing out José María Alfredo Aznar López for having the timerity to deal with a close and gathering threat.

- Thank you to Ikonos for finding the item, who noted:
That leftist judges can be proud of their stupidity.

Not master of its domain

Tic-tac tic-tac tic-tac.

"Est-il vraiment besoin de vous rappeler la crapule marxiste que fut Salvador Allende ... ?"

The Chicago Boyz jog our memories as to the Allende myth. More here.

L'establishment va falloir rendre compte et rendre gorge

The French establishment is just waking up (as always, too late) to the upcoming pro-Le Pen vote that will be offered up by suburban French youth. Ces connards de soixante-huitards bobos pédaloïdes vont bientôt souiller le fonds de leurs culottes.

A Correction

Earlier this week, in a post on the press’ glossing over of threats from the Near East, I made reference to a conference which discussed the risks that an Iran which threatens violence and annihilation poses when it has functioning nuclear weapons.

Caroline Glick was kind enough to write to us with a more accurate account of how her presentation was received. The one we linked included inaccurate embellishments of the emotional state of the audience and the speaker.

I just was sent the link to your entry where you discuss the speech I gave at the Aish conference in Connecticut last month.

I did in fact discuss the Iranian nuclear threat. I did say that if the US or Israel do not act within 6 months to take action against Iran's nuclear program we will face the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran. I did not give a timeframe for when Iran would attack Israel with nuclear weapons but I did say that Iran is building nuclear weapons with the intention of using them.

I also said that we are far from helpless to deal with the situation.

I did not cry, I did not despair. I did not notice that any of the 800 people in the hall were crying. Certainly no one was wailing or visibly freaking out.

Let me extend my apologies to our readers and especially to Caroline for repeating Chaim Mechanic’s overraught and inaccurate description.

Who needs Goebbels when they have the BBC?

Normally pretending to be high-minded, culturally tuned-in and generally "gesellig" BBC Radio 4 is so desperate to kick any Jew they can find that they invited former Klansman an all-around anti-American dirtbag David Duke on the radio to discuss “questioning” the Holocaust.

On the BBC Radio 4 PM news programme at 5:00pm this evening, through its coverage of the Iranian conference to "examine whether the Holocaust actually happened", a lengthy and indulgent platform was given to David Duke, who is to be one of the presenters at the conference.

Adloyada points out one little problem with their exposition:

The Wikipedia entry for Duke also shows that in 2000 he published a book called Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question. The book purports to "examine and document elements of ethnic supremacism that have existed in the Jewish community from historical to modern times".

Nowhere in the programme was this information shared with the listeners.

The left have gone from detesting David Duke because they though they could associate him with Conservatives, to ignoring his hateful ideas because he’s willingly pander to their view of the world.

Any way you shake it, it says a lot about the left's abscent morality.

HUUUUmanity MUST Do Something!

The horrors! How do we redress the inequality?!?

A Nation of Arms Peddlers

Like foreign policy driven by TotalElfFina, French UAV overflights (as many French are reasoning about many of the actions in the UNIFIL deployment) are to prove weapons to make them a better sell:

According to Israeli defense sources, the French initiative is also meant to prove the operational capabilities of its UAVs so they can compete against Israeli defense industries on the global UAV market.

What proves it for me is why they would even bother trying to use drones to track fighter sorties than you could with one or two ship mounted radars?The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Calling all racaille

The Front National continues to canvas the shitholes inhabited by French youth with their new campaign poster. The poster reminds everyone of the violence of France's Muslim riots while placing the blame for them squarely on the French establishment.



Nationality. Integration. Social advancement. Secularism. The Right, the Left. They destroyed everything.

IsraHeil !

French Minstrel Show	Iranian Minstrel Show

Asleep at the switch

Maybe it's the 35 hour work week. Maybe it's the approaching holiday season. Maybe they're just asleep at the switch. It is only today that Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine woke up to the fact that America's Worst President Ever, Jimmy Carter, has written a sleazy anti-Semitic rant of a book. The screed is celebrated in today's edition.

Plantu finds meaning in the “real” 9-11

I wonder, what his next petty obsession be? Whatever it is, Europeans never seem to be involved. Amazingly, since they were sieved up on Pinochet in a way that they never were with Pol Pot who murdered millions, or the great liberator of their feelings of guilt, Robert Mugabe, one can only admire their “humanistic” opinions for what they are: mental masturbation.

They Manage your Temperament. Be Thankful.

The AP, as usual, is covering up the embarrassments of those who engage in their preferred ideology. Ségolène Royal’s moronic gaffes in Beirut (as if anyone there could vote for her) as a part of her attempt to appear to have some international affairs gravitas gets soft pedaled even as nations fear abandonment to nuclear annihilation by Iranians driven by nothing other than their ideology. John Rosenthal evaluates the AP glossing over of lightweight running for high office:

The occassion was a meeting of Royal with the Foreign Affairs committee of the Lebanese parliament on Friday, December 1 in Beirut. The French Ambassador to Lebanon, Bernard Emié, was also present. According to the reports of French journalists present at the meeting, Ali Ammar launched into a long tirade, denouncing what he called "the unlimited dementia of the American administration" and repeatedly referring to Israel as the "Zionist entity." In an apparent gesture of good will toward the parliament's French guests, Ammar compared Hezbollah's "resistance" vis-à-vis said "entity" to the French resistance to the German occupation during the Second World War. "Even our experience of resistance is inspired by your experience," he said, and he continued: "The Nazism that spills our blood and that has usurped our independence and our sovereignty is no less bad than the Nazism that occupied France."

In the interest of their own political agenda, AP spun it this way:

Lebanon: French presidential candidate Segolene Royal, visiting the Middle East on Saturday, condemned comments by a Lebanese Hezbollah legislator who compared Israel's former occupation of south Lebanon to the Nazi occupation of France.

The Socialist former family minister is touring the Middle East to show voters back home that she can represent France in the international arena. Her trip began Thursday in Lebanon, and it continues through the weekend with visits to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Never mind the fact that the Israeli are not occupying southern Lebanon, and that the Shabaa Farms dispute was ginned up to keep the hatred alive. The area in question was previously disputed by Lebanon and Syria – a pissing contest trumped by the Syrian loss of the Golan heights when Syria attacked Israel.

Caroline Glick speaks to the obvious outcome of events on the other end of the missiles’ trajectory:

Last Thursday night, Malcolm Hoenlein and Caroline Glick spoke to 800 people at the Aish Hatotah Conference. It was the most disturbing and frightening experience I have ever had. In a nutshell, they said, with overwhelming evidence, that there is no question that Iran will nuke Israel within the next 6-24 months. At some point people started to freak out and many many people were crying, some sobbing out loud. At that point, Caroline Glick, who is not frum at all, began to also cry, said she is sorry, but this is the reality. They both said that America will not attack Iran and that Olmert doesn't have what it takes to do it either. They said that the only one who can maybe do the job is Netanyahu, but he won't be in power in time.

What will Europe’s leftist do? Will they weep over an irradiated Tel Aviv, and the radioactive fallout that will rain over the (politically) “holy city” of Ramallah and over Amman as they have for the past three decades about Hiroshima?

The Baker report doesn’t just advocate abandoning all of the goals of bringing down Saddam Hussein, but tacitly accepts that Arab societies and Iran are irredeemably violent as it is with other Arab states and its’ populations?

“Whatever” the Euro-ponces say. The bigger problem afoot is the making of a demon. In this case belittling the US with the unproven implication that the CIA wasted manpower spying on their precious Princess Diana. The though is the height of self-importance concidering that the implication in the absesnce if dates and names is that George Bush did it even though it was during the Clinton time in office. Knowing how Clinton gutted the CIA, I imagine that the only way it’s possible was to make a play at preserving their capability by indulging the Clintonian obsession with media and entertainment.

Among extraordinary details due to emerge in the report by former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Stevens is the revelation that the US security service was bugging her calls in the hours before she was killed in a car crash in Paris.

No matter: Bush Spied, Diana died! goes the smear of the day.

When the Big Screamers Have Little Screamers

There’s a sucker bred every minute.

To my mind, however, his appearance in all post-revolutionary photographs of him, save the most famous one by Alberto Korda, is that of a man distinctly unwashed. No doubt this accounts for a proportion of his continuing popularity among youth.
Some purists, or rationalists, might object that one’s aesthetic response to Guevara is rather beside the point. The trouble with Hitler was not his absurd appearance, after all, or with Stalin his pockmarked complexion. And yet, if we analyze Guevara’s popular appeal more than a third of a century after his timely death, we can see that it is the result of aesthetic and emotional responses rather than rational reflection, responses that are now kept alive by a good dose of commercialism.

- Dr. Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple)

Lou Minatti Is Not Dead

Not only is he not dead, he’s “enchilada-blooging” and heckling morons out house-hunting.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)